Randall Hoven has written a cool think piece on nature, man and ignorance.
When dealing with other men, if you can't just kill them, you need to deal with what is inside their heads, which has almost nothing to do with "reality" in the sense of man against nature. If the other man thinks you are a devil who must be vanquished at all costs, it does you absolutely no good to know that you are, in fact, not a devil. And the things that might convince the other man that you are not a devil have nothing to do with, say, evidence, the scientific method, or looking up "devil" in the dictionary.But when the adversary is not nature, but fellow men, rationality as normally considered is out the window. We live in a world where Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank are taken seriously. Where Libya is given the chair on the Human Rights commission at the UN. Where heads of state genuinely believe sheep farts are dangerously heating up the planet.
From US politics to world events, it's a battle of competing realities. Read the whole article here...
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/04/stop_making_sense.html
3 comments:
I think that's actually the problem, Silverfiddle.
Lots of people treating each other like devils who live in separate realities, and not a shared life where everyone deserves to be treated decent.
Unfortuntately, I think a lot of chickens are coming home to roost for the Administration for treating those who disagree with them like enemies, rather than fellow citizens. They will undoubtedly come home to roost for Democrats, as well, and the Obama Administration, if they move in that same direction.
I don't care how much everyone pretends like the way we are engaged in politics, right now, is really a-ok. It's not. We've lost our way.
Power is not a plaything. And Americans will be learning hard lessons around that fact until they face facts. Namely, that power is not something to be wielded lightly or that solves our problems easily, if at all.
Humanity has romanticized power's ability to do that very thing since the beginning of our history. And we have, largely, been wrong.
Watching that confrontation with Condoleeza Rice, I realize that stakes in this debate are too high to continue to operate this way and act like no big deal. It is so sad and ironic that so many conservatives would be mocking empathy at the very moment that so many in their leadership are going to so desperately need it. The Obama Administration, if you watch them, is trying to run interference for the last Administration on this issue of torture. I do not want to see them prosecuted, unless they were engaged in clear and gross abuses of human rights or, as is being alleged, crimes as serious as murder.
But there is no way we can sort through those issues as long as we treat one another like enemies or monsters rather than simply people with disagreements.
And it is that failure, on our parts, at the core, it is that cowardice that we carry around with us to love our neighbors as ourselves, that is our most serious division and problem as a nation, right now.
It needs to end.
My life is committed to ending it. Because if it doesn't, it will tear us apart. And we have quite enough of that, already, in America, as it stands.
"...it is that cowardice that we carry around with us to *not* love our neighbors as ourselves..."
I agree with you on the misunderstanding of what power can do. People dream of solving problems, when in real life, very few things are ever solved, they're just ameliorated or kicked down the road. Some things are simply irremediable.
It's interesting how you chalk this up to cowardice. I never thought of it quite like that, but I do see your point. We live safe, secure lives here; you would think that would give people courage to love and understand instead of engaging in this constant lacerating of one another.
You're a good teacher, Ben. You always make me think.
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